The seed and the soil.
“Look at what you’ve accomplished,” whispers Observer, wonder in His voice. “The Humans will spread across this dark spot, this wound in Network’s mind, and they will tell your story as they build their empire. Your legend will be told over their fires, across the electromagnetic spectrum, ship to ship, station to outpost, parent to child, across the generations and lightyears. They will speak of the Human who freed them, who gave them a home, who seized that which belonged to her enemy and gave it to her own people.” And now Observer laughs softly, a sound of pure childlike joy. “But they won’t call you Daughter,” he says. “No, my dear Sarya: they will call you by the title you’ve earned.”
And now a chant begins to rise, a single word repeated rhythmically. It begins at the farthest edges of the clearing, back in the darkness where Sarya’s Human eyes cannot see. It grows, and now Sarya can hear the percussive strikes of Observer’s music rise beneath it.
“What are You saying?” she whispers.
“Your name,” says Observer with a smile. “The title by which you’ll be known, from one side of the Human Empire to the other.”
And suddenly she realizes that Observer is touching her. His many hands are on her, his fingers caressing her through her utility suit. His hands find hers and begin to pull her downward. She sinks to her knees, her eyes on the heavens, overcome by His words.
“I’ve shown you many false skies, Daughter,” says Observer, one of His mouths nearly against her ear. “Now I will show you the real thing. This is what reality looks like, here at My Blackstar. This is what We’ve accomplished for the Human species.”
This time, Sarya’s eyes are open when the sky flashes white. She turns her head and holds them almost closed against the glare, but it does not die—it burns through her eyelids like fire. The figures around her are outlined in white, their feet submerged in stark black puddles of shadow on the ruin of the clearing floor. They hold their small hands up against the light, squinting through the spaces between their fingers. With uncountable eyes, Observer looks upward—and after a moment, Sarya forces herself to do the same.
Half the sky is black, as black as the forest that shrouds the horizon in every direction. The other half is white, so bright that her eyes ache even when she holds them nearly closed. Once they begin to adjust, she can see that the white half is not pure; it outlines a mess of black geometry. Those are Observer’s worlds, she realizes. Thousands of black cubes, each one the size of the planet she is standing on, and yet each only a particle of a single mind. But if they are His mind, what is the radiance behind them? This brilliant glow that backlights His brain, this vast swath of changing light the size of half the sky—
“What is that?” she whispers.
“Above us, you see three things,” whispers Observer. “You see My Blackstar, now living up to its name. You see the thousands of cubes that make up My mind—together for the first time. And the last thing?” The pounding of the chant has not stopped; it shakes the ground beneath Sarya’s knees—and yet she can hear the voice whispering in her ear with complete clarity. “That,” murmurs Observer, “is just a hint of what is happening in these eight hundred star systems. That, My partner and almost-person, is the glow of six trillion starships annihilating one another.”
The sentence is so matter-of-fact, and so completely beyond Sarya’s reasoning, that she feels she has not understood. “It’s—it’s what?” she says.
“It’s painful to you now, I’m sure,” says another Observer, its own eyes on the sky. “You still identify with these little cells. But you are becoming more. Soon you will understand, as I do, that all we see here are a few bloody noses. The people will survive; only a few of their cells will die. And then they will re-enter the age-old struggle. The natural order of things, free from Network’s influence. And Our person, our Human?” Observer sighs, the sound moving like a wave over the clearing. “She will finally have Her chance.”
Sarya stares upward, riveted. The longer she looks, the more she can make out. There are pinpoints of color, dramatic bursts here and there, the occasional flare as something big goes up in multiple stages. Each is appreciated by a long ooh or ahh from the crowd of Observers. She has an overpowering urge to make order of this, to reconnect these hapless minds, to stop this destruction in its tracks. She reaches upward with all her strength, strains for something to grasp and pull herself along, but there is nothing here. The background texture of Network, the web she took for granted—it’s no longer here. There’s nothing she can do.
And then she falls, back into the darkness, back into her own tiny mind.
An Observer pats her on the shoulder with a gentle smile on its face. “Order is unnatural,” it says. “It costs energy to maintain. Disorder, on the other hand, happens all by itself.”
Remember that He is a murderer and a liar, that He would love nothing more than to see the galaxy perish in fire and chaos.
And suddenly, she understands the title that Observer is chanting.
“Destroyer,” say a billion mouths across the face of a cube the size of a minor planet. “Destroyer,” roars a voice spread across thousands of worlds, each with billions of voices of its own. And finally, with the force of a thousand earthquakes: “DESTROYER!”
Sarya the Destroyer trembles, her eyes riveted to a sky on fire.
Wake up, thinks Sarya the Destroyer.
Sandy’s eyes open all at once, squinting against the maelstrom in the sky behind Sarya’s head. They blink a complex pattern that Sarya can’t read. Sandy doesn’t move, but that’s probably because of the Human hand wrapped around her throat. Sarya may only have one functional hand, but it works well enough for this.
“What’s it saying?” whispers Right.
“What’s she saying,” corrects Left. “I think.”
“She,” confirms Sarya. “Ace?”
She is glad, in this bright alien hellscape, that she still has her Network unit. Ace may not be particularly useful, but he’s a familiar voice—and she has recently discovered that familiar voices are more important than she might have realized. “Hold on,” says Ace’s voice in her ears. “Okay, she’s saying…yeah, I have no idea. I didn’t think to download a blink dictionary before the Network went away because, you know, I couldn’t imagine a world where the Network had gone away and—wait, I think—yeah, no. No idea.”
Sarya didn’t expect any better, but it’s still unfortunate. “I know it doesn’t look like it,” she says to Sandy, with more mouth movement than voice, “but I want to…thank you. For saving me a little while ago. From your dad.” And I want to avoid getting killed by that same dad in the next few seconds, she decides not to add. Sandy knows what she is doing, she is sure.